Forewarned is forearmed

City officials can issue their pro-forma denials until the cows come home, but it’s pretty clear to every New Yorker that the city now looks on parking tickets as a revenue source to replace at least some other tax revenues that have dwindled amid the recession.

The extent of the impact of the city’s increasingly aggressive enforcement policy was disclosed at a City Council hearing last week. The 832,290 summonses issued from July 1 through the end of January of this year represent a jump of 10.5 percent over the number during the same period in 2008-2009. And, because steeper fines have been implemented since, the city is on a pace to collect nearly $700 million in fines from parking tickets this year — up 12 percent over a year ago, according to the New York Police Department’s top budget expert.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly denies that the sharply increased totals indicate a deliberate policy of using fines as a back-door tax. He insisted he’s never “had a conversation in my role as commissioner about generating revenue based on tickets.”

He may never have had that verbatim conversion, but other statistics tell a different story about the city’s shifted priorities.

The number of police officers in the NYPD ranks will be down to 32,817 by the end of Fiscal Year 2011. That’s the lowest headcount for the NYPD in 20 years.

Meanwhile, however, the number of Traffic Enforcement Agents (TEAs) deployed by the city Department of Transportation has swelled to more than 3,100 with the addition of 234 agents last year. Traffic Enforcement Agents’ primary responsibility is to issue parking tickets. The more of them there are, the more tickets are issued and the more fine money that flows into city coffers.

And it’s pretty clear that while city officials will also deny that there are hard ticket quotas, TEAs and police officers are expected to produce in terms of issuing parking summonses. Judging by the numbers, they have done just that. A 12-percent spike in parking fine revenue over one year indicates that the agents have heard their marching orders loud and clear.

The Bloomberg administration’s vehement objections to and veto — subsequently overridden — of a clumsy City Council move to allow a five-minute grace period at expired meters is another indication of the administration’s intention to get its hands on as much fine revenue as it can.

Technically, the city is within its rights and there is undoubtedly a need to enforce parking regulations. Illegal parking, left unchecked, can become a plague that plays havoc with traffic, public safety and even quality of life in many communities. It has happened in the past. But the “gotcha” mentality seen so often of late is what galls many people. In many cases, TEAs hover near meters about to expire and pounce the second they do. As we’ve said before in this space, that’s predation, not proper enforcement.

In any case, forewarned is forearmed. By now, all drivers in the city should know that the city is taking this hard line. So they have that advantage, at least. They can protect themselves against this get-tough policy by making sure they obey all parking regulations to the letter — no excuses. That’s how the city is approaching it. It’s how smart drivers should, too.